How is Nokia's Ovi Store doing? I mean really doing?

One of the best things Nokia could do is to make a *native* S60 app for the S60 platform. I suppose that the WRT based Ovi Store works OK, but it's just not good enough. Doesn't cache well, can't realistically check updates (w/out a purpose built extension) and is honestly somewhat slow.

I like the idea of a web based desktop store, web based device store and the WRT perhaps in addition as well, but native would help a lot. Once you have a great storefront on the device, user's will use it more and attract more developers.

Also, why not do FOTA and app updates in that native S60 store too?

While you do have a point that you cant just take numbers for numbers without separating them into categories as I consumer that's the only thing I need to know. That is basing the success by how many downloads or number of new items that are available.

From a developer's standpoint that is more crucial as you have pointed out and I do agree with you on that.

It is though a bit misleading when they state that each user have downloaded at least 6 items. From my impression of you post Nokia "don't care" about what is being downloaded (apps, ringtones or videos etc.) and based on that if they only count download numbers this can be completely wrong.
This is due to the fact that I've downloaded the same applications and videos more than one time. With unsuccessful installation or downloads the items you will show up as duplicates in your "my stuff" list. Taking the number from here will therefore not reveal "true downloads". (Where true means no duplicates are allowed for one user).

I do see growth in terms of application offers in the OVI Store and many known applications from Epocware, Smartphoneware and applications such as Midomi, Shozu, Gravity ++, are starting to pop up there which I find is a really neat thing. This will allow users to use the OVI Store more, to find new applications.

the ovi store is a complete joke when it comes to finding and downloading apps. if i need a ringtone, podcast (wtf???), or theme i know i can find lots of them there, but if i want to find apps that i want to install on my phone this is not the place to go. even comparing it to the apple or android app stores is an insult to apple and android.

i have been trying to find some apps for my n86 nam and it has been frustrating and a huge waste of time. something basic like just searching for apps doesnt even work well. i can enter a term or phrase and no results will come back, but if i manually scroll through pages upon pages of downloads (not apps) i will find the app that i was looking for. now that i have found that app how great of a user experience is it when i click on it and am taken to a page that says this app is no longer available? if it isnt available then take it out of the store.

now lets just say that i am lucky enough to find an app that i want to download there are other issues. one is the price of some decent apps. 15 and 20 euros for an app? give me a break. now here is the next problem, lets say i think that i might be interested in spending 20 euros on an app if it lives up to the description i have no trial (for the majority of apps i have been interested in). with the android store i can try it out and if i dont like it (not just if it is faulty or the listing is wrong) in the first 24hrs i can have it removed and have a full refund right away. with the ovi store you buy it you are stuck with it. if you read the terms of use it says that i need proof of purchase to even consider getting a refund and it could take 30 days, etc etc etc. why would i need proof of anything when i installed it through ovi with my username?

its like they are trying to do everything possible to provide a poor experience. make it hard to find apps, yes. allow the prices to be much too high compared to other apps stores, yes. make it very difficult if not impossible to get your money back if the app sucks, yes. have a very limited and poor selection of apps, yes (and this is crazy considering how s60 has been around for soooo many years and sells how many phones). every single time i use open the ovi store i end up shaking my head and leaving empty handed. i even tried to voice my opinion to them via the website and that was a brutal experience. has anyone tried to send them an email? they want your address, phone number, name, etc just for me to talk to them. if they really want to know what people think they should make it much easier for people to contact them, i mean let me click a link and have a box appear where i can type my comment or question and press send. thats it.

i love this site and the work you guys do but when steve does comparisons of the major app stores and makes it seem like the ovi store is remotely close to apple or android it makes me think he is getting drunk on exhaust fumes while recording parts of his phoneshow (which i love).

> Even if you don't have an iPhone you know �there's an app for that� as a slogan.

No; I don't, and I didn't.

Ever tried searching for something on Ovi store's phone client? Don't. It's quite probably the worst search engine in the history of search engines.

Not that there is anything worth searching for anyway.

I recently bought 'wheel of fortune' game for my N97 which was so bad that I had to delete it. Waste of $.

Nokia get your act together.

@ Unregistered,

then you either:

A) Never watch TV
B) Never go on the Internet
C) Live under a rock or,
D) All of the above

I'm gonna go with D myself. How you've never heard or saw one of Apples commercials that have been airing for a year or more is beyond me?

Oh wait, found the real answer, S60 or worse, Nokia fanboy who probably turns the channel over or who clocks the "x" button whenever something involving Apple comes into view for fear of "becoming one of the sheep" >_>.

I bet you even felt disgusted when this editorial even mentioned the "Jesus" phone huh...

I think it could be just good that they don't advertise their Ovi store yet.. as you can see here, the Ovi search engine is broken (and has been broken for almost 2 months already) http://discussion.forum.nokia.com/forum//forum/thread/178042/ It's sad but true.. Ewan, excellent article!

Great! some articles what do not say: Ovi store is fantastic, just a little bit not completed

Ovi store miss so much of things witch makes it suck, like:

- Lack of automatic updates
- Lack of programs
- Lack of good search engine
- Lack of easy to use categories
- Lack of overall usability

Njaah, now I don't want to continue that list because it would get very long.

Ovi store is an epic fail.

The Ovi store for me is just too difficult. I don't know how 5th edition phones view it, but on the limited symbian v3 it isnt attractive. It doesn't appeal, as in that it doesnt showcase the best apps. Perhaps it is because the symbian interface is old, or that Nokia are not attracting the same developers as the iphone App store I don't know. The iphone now sells based on it's extensive app store, not only from it's great OS. Nokia need to do some work on ovi, but to get some perspective......it IS still new and isn't the only apps store out there. Android for me has the best chance of surpassing the Apple store, as Google is a major name online, bigger than Apple imo.

i am more likely to find more and better stuff on warez sites than in ovi store. and its not about the money cause i do buy those i like.

No, I haven't been inhaling exhaust fumes..... 8-)

If you look at the actual SCORES I gave in my app store head to head in the last Phones Show, you'll see that Ovi was significantly behind the others.... Yes, I was a little generous in the actual commentary, but that's in part because I believe that Nokia can turn this round and in part because I'm getting a little weary of 'mega' app stores in the first place. As I said in my text in http://3lib.ukonline.co.uk/sshow/ss91.html most people only need a handful of good apps, not 10,000 rubbish ones with a few jewels in their midst. In which case, it's not all about app numbers. Or even average quality.

Watch this space for an idea of mine along these lines. If I ever get time to write it! 8-)

please question whether it's fair to criticise nokia for not giving you the numbers that make it easy for you to compre it with other stores. if they only give numbers that include non-apps, then perhaps you should critisize the other stores for not offering such content, after all there's nothing wrong with selling that and noting wrong with including those sales in the total,especially when many of the markets the ovi stor sells into favours such and they supposedly make it very easy to buy cheap tings like that by enabling operator billing.

perhaps they called it the ovi store and not the ovi app store for a reason...

I am still waiting for the old labyrinth of Nokia Mosh and the maze of Widsets to open doors again : the fun of Install > try > uninstall/keep I am missing a lot .....
Also S60.com . I wouldn't mind to open up doors .
Chaos compared to regime can be lovely !

😊 Regards jApi NL

In my experience, the Ovi store does not allow re-downloading software that is not free. You can re-download free apps, but not the ones you have paid for. This kind of defeats the whole point of re-downloading.

Some other gripes I have with the store is that it is slow, hard to use, and the search-facility is a joke. It even fails to find apps I am looking at while doing the search! In addition, Ovi store seems to be unavailable more often than it is available.

All of this taken together, I think Ovi Store is a disaster for Nokia. I prefer to find application other places. This is of course very bad for software makers who rely on Ovi Store for distributing their apps. It is certainly not the selling point it should be.

unregistered above, Nokia has recently started rolling out the re-downloads for paid apps.

Nokia app store is OK, easy enough to find stuff, easy to download the free stuff. I've never downloaded paid stuff because a Symbian phone comes with almost everything I want.

But most apps are just silly gimmicks that I would try out a couple of times and forget. I'm not interested in games, or silly themes or idiotic banal ringtones. All I need is extra email(profimail direct from the author) andBBC iPlayer plus sport tracker and maps. Everything else is just a bit of a waste of time. And that applies equally to the Apple App store and Android too. It's all just toys.

And as for that advertising slogan, I wasn't aware either. Perhaps because I am just not interested and don't take it in. A lot of people are gullible suckers for commercialism and advertising, I think I am immune.

I find this a strange one but the truth is I don't give a fig about Ovi store.
My E71 has most of the basic apps I need pre installed. The bits that weren't there, are available e.g. You Tube and BBC Iplayer. OK it might be nice to have a few extra games but I'm not a big gamer. I am not jealous of the extra apps that Iphone users have in fact I find a lot of them very childish. Perhaps it just symptomatic of the different use and markets that these two platforms are aimed at and maybe also explains why they both have a place!

From the 3-4 weeks use I had from my 5800XM when I had it, I found the Ovi store to have a great range of useful applications, and while it hasn't quite taken off just yet, I think it definitely will in the near future. It's just a case of developers seeing that there is the interest in Ovi store, and a lot of them just haven't seen that the App Store isn't the place to be anymore and will hopefully be turning to other OSs soon (App World, Android Market, Ovi store, etc).

However, when Ovi store does take off, Nokia are going to need to decide what they want to do with it. I've noticed that lately the 'Download' feature on S60 is empty and saying to go to the Ovi store now, but they still need to encorporate N-Gage into the Ovi store, as well as Nokia Music to make it all a lot easier to manage for Symbian users, hopefully bringing more interest into Symbian devices and the Ovi store in the long run.

Give up on Ovi, Nokia - dump the Store and the other garbage that never works.

Maps and Mail are OK, they deserve to be improved and marketed independently, not buried in the Ovi disaster. The people have spoken: [bold]we won't want your sucky portal, Nokia[/bold]

Like DriftNismo I have a S60 5th edition handset and my experience as such is quite alright besides not being able to install application I download from OVI on my memory card (I think I mentioned that).

As far as the search function goes I totally agree that it's bad both on OVI Store for S60v3 and S60v5 handsets.

Further there is a limit on how many textmessages you can send during a day, a limit in which I hit (20 textmessages to be exactly) when I tried downloading several free applications. Now this function is actually quite good and I do understand the limit as they don't cost anything for the user.

When I got the textmessage, opened the link in the webbrowser and pressed download the most annoying bit was that the N97 always opened the built-in OVI Store and taking some time to load up. Exiting it and then hit download in the webbrowser again I was finally able to download the application I wanted.
Now I know the purpose is to use the OVI Store client, but when search and download + install don't work as I want, (Install application on memory card), it kind of defies the purpose of having the client in the first place.

The client has only just been made available for the N95-1. I wanted a voice recorder app, so I searched for "voice recorder", "recorder", "voice", "dictaphone", and came up with... nothing. A google search on the other hand lead me to "Ultimate Voice Recorder" which I bought from Clickgamer for about a tenner.

Conclusion: Ovi store was late to market and is crap.

"The client has only just been made available for the N95-1."

um.. was on my n95-1 for quite a while, pretty much since launch..

RollerSMB wrote:"The client has only just been made available for the N95-1."

um.. was on my n95-1 for quite a while, pretty much since launch..

Ovi store didn't exist when N95-1 was launched. It had another thing, Download.

RollerSMB wrote:"The client has only just been made available for the N95-1."

um.. was on my n95-1 for quite a while, pretty much since launch..

Sorry, I should have said "for *my* N95-1" (UK Model). My missus is still waiting for firmware version-before-last for her 5800, too.

Hello,

i tried the ovi story yesterday for the first time. It was really an awful experience. When I first go to a site I like to browse it without having to register, but with ovi story is really difficult to see anything without registering and when you do it seems it's because of a programming error more than an intentional path.

Then I tried to find and app. And time after time it offered no results. Then I tried to browser categories, but it showed nothing. Then I noticed it was because the search term still was active. I had to click the home link to reach a clean category list.

Then I had to browse page after page until I found the required app. I wanted to see if it was available for 5800, but I couldn't see that information in any place (I wasn't registered) and on the top it said I was browsing n95 apss.. I googled for the application name and went to the developer home page where far better info was offered. I don't think i will come back to ovi in a long time....

I came to the symbian platform because of the degree of freedom that installing new applications gave me and for the added functionality I thought it would offer me, but lately I think they are severely behind competition and at least for me they are on the limit of not being useful (No functional divx player on 5800xm??!!).

Now, each time I don't found an app I look around if it exists on iphone, windows or android and almost always it exists on iphone, most ot the times it exists on windows and sometimes it exists on android. Having into account the number of phones sold for each platform is very clear Nokia is doing something extremely bad.

If it wasn't for the poor multitasking and the dictatorship-like policy of iPhone I probably would have bought one, even if the form factor is not my preferred one. 😞